A heaping helping of the chef's choice

After years of dreaming about a trip to Japan, passing it over in selecting my vacation destinations, I am finally going to make that daunting trip and see what this mysterious country has to offer. I’ve chosen less expensive and more accessible locations time and time again, mostly in fear of the unknown that could await me in Japan. However, as a lifelong fan of video games, anime, and severe culture shock, it was only a matter of time until I made this trip.

You’d be lying to me if you told me you had no interest in traveling there as well, in fact, I doubt you’d be wasting your time reading this post if there wasn’t even a grain of interest in making the trip yourself someday. Well, through my own preparation and adventuring I want to show that you can definitely make the trip too.

Video game endings are fickle things. They are the final moments of an experience that requires hours of investment, only to be seen if the game can manage to sustain the interest of the player, which isn’t always easy to accomplish with the amount of games competing for attention in today’s gaming market. When a game ends poorly, there’s a noticeable blemish attached to that experience. No matter what sort of innovations or strides the game has made they are tainted with an unfulfilling ending. Beating a game implies that you’ve triumphed over the opposition that developers have put into place, beating the game means that you’ve committed to seeing something to the end, beating the game used to really mean something to me when I started playing games, and I think that beating the game deserves a true feeling of accomplishment.

Perusing a Kotaku discussion about one of my favorite games growing up, a contributor touched on a sobering but extremely memorable experience they’ve had in Animal Crossing.

This transcends the gap between reality and gaming for me. Since this game encompasses everything that a which is the everyday humdrum and community based game has, there is this chilling repercussion as the game takes on the facets of death. Villagers move away and return; however there is never the insistance on an end.

There’s no arguing the fact that Nintendo has become mad geniuses when it comes to new iterations of handheld devices; not to mention their similar treatment of the actual consoles. We are constantly tickled with the prospects of a newer look and feel to our supposedly current investment; and when that screen gets bigger or gains a backlight, it makes the old version seems so flat.